The invention relates to a device serving to fashion carrying handles for attachment to a sheet of wrapping film.
The prior art embraces numerous machines that are able to produce a wrapping, with handles, such as will envelop a product to be packaged. Certain of these machines fashion the handles in the finished package, for example, by double-folding and punching hand holes through the wrapping material; however, a considerable waste of material is involved with such methods, packages of a certain length are not always easy to carry, and most significant, the machine can not readily be adapted to turn out different sizes of wrapping.
Prior art methods of fashioning the handles for such wrappings currently follow one of two distinct directions, the difference between which consists substantially in the moment at which the handle is attached to the wrapping film. In a first method, the handle is applied to a wrapping which already envelops the packaged product, whereas in a second method, developed by the same applicant, a piece of material constituting the handle is applied to the film before the product is wrapped.
Departing from this second method, which is able to avoid damage to the product occasioned by application of the handle and permits of adapting the machine for different sizes of wrapping in extremely simple fashion, the applicant now seeks to overcome a drawback relating to the thickness of the wrapping materials utilized, namely, the bulk sheet, or film, and the strip material used to fashion the handle.
A tendency exists, dictated by cost, to limit the thickness both of the film and of the handle strip as far as possible, with the result that the finished wrapping does not always afford sufficient strength when the package is suspended and carried by its handle.
Practical experiment has shown that the film tends to break, not at the point where the handle is joined (heat-sealed in the majority of instances), but in the area immediately surrounding the join.
Accordingly, the object of the invention is to overcome this drawback and thus permit of utilizing film of limited thickness in the interests of cost-effective manufacture.